Discover the Magic of Plant Journaling!

Imagine expanding your plant collection in a single day while learning how to care for each new addition expertly. Join Carla and her best friend Sammy as they recount their exciting trip to Williamsburg, where they received an array of plants from a kind lady named Linda. From a money tree to various Dieffenbachia, lucky bamboo shoots, a mystery plant, and Dracaena Lemon Lime, Carla shares her top tips for caring for these plants using terracotta stakes for auto-watering and craft dowels for support.

Discover the countless benefits of keeping a plant journal and how it can transform your gardening experience. Carla delves into the practicalities of tracking your plant's progress, maintaining detailed records, and adding a personal touch with photos and drawings. Whether you’re a fan of digital tools like the Greg app and Seed Time or prefer traditional methods like pen and paper, Carla offers invaluable advice to help you stay organized and informed.

Get inspired to make your plant journal uniquely yours with creative tips and techniques. Explore different journaling methods from bullet journaling combined with scrapbooking to adding layout diagrams and Gantt charts for task management. Carla emphasizes the importance of personalizing your journal, making it a convenient and motivational tool. Share your journal pages on Instagram and explore Carla’s Pinterest boards for even more inspiration. Celebrate the joys of plant journaling and elevate your gardening journey!

Greg App: https://greg.app/
Seedtime App: https://seedtime.us/
The Bullet Journal Method: https://bulletjournal.com/
My Pinterest Gardening Boards: https://www.pinterest.com/Clairefox007/gardening/
1Password App: https://1password.com/

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/GrowingWithCarla
Full transcripts available on my website!

Transcript

Carla: 0:06

Hey friends, welcome back to the garden. I'm Carla and I'm excited to have you join me for another episode of Growing with Carla. Whether you're a seasoned plant parent or just starting to bud out, this is the place to share our ideas and grow together as we nurture our leafy babies. We have another fun topic to go over today, but first let's do a plant update. This week's podcast is going to have a little bit longer of a plant update, and for a very fun reason.

Carla: 0:33

So on last Sunday evening, sammy, my best friend, and I were hanging out at City Center and I just happened to have seen a notification pop up on my phone about free plants. So it was on the freebies app not sponsored, which relayed her posting from Facebook app not sponsored, and I messaged her. Her name was Linda, she was wonderful, and I messaged her. Her name was Linda, she was wonderful, and she was like, yeah, come and get it. So I'm like sweet, and she asked if I knew how to take care of the plants. I'm like yes, and I shared the info to the podcast here and she's like, oh, so can you bring some pots because I have more plants for you then? So I'm like yes, I can bring more pots. I have like 20 sitting in the garage that are not currently used. So, yes, because I have more plants for you then. So I'm like, yes, I can bring more pots. I have like 20 sitting in the garage that are not currently used. So, yes, I have pots.

Carla: 1:38

So we drove all the way to Williamsburg and we met Linda. She's a wonderful lady. She has gorgeous plants. They're actually pretty well taken care of. The ones that we received from her with. The leaves look rugged but the plant itself and the roots were all healthy. So, linda, you're doing a great job. So thank you again for all the plants that you gave us. I know the ones that are still in your home are going to be doing amazing and a big shout out to you. So thank you.

Carla: 2:03

So, starting with the plants that we received from Linda, one of them was a money tree. The leaves were kind of rugged but overall, again, very healthy plant. Once I get it with more leaves on it, this is one that's going to be going to my friend Sammy, because I do already have a money tree. The next one was similar to the one that our friend Emma gave me, so I think it's called a different bakia and so it was a three stems in one pot. I'm pretty sure they're all off the same plant from when we repotted it, so we just put it the plastic pot into a larger ceramic pot to help with drainage, so that it didn't like flow onto my floor or kitchen table, and it's doing great. We put one of those terracotta stakes that uses a recycled water bottle for auto watering on it and it's been happy since. We also got two lucky bamboo shoots, which are super adorable. Leaves on one was kind of yellow, but overall very healthy. The roots look very healthy. We moved them to larger pots and then used craft dowels to help support them in standing up, because they were the roots weren't settled into the new pots yet and so they needed a little extra support.

Carla: 3:24

There was another plant that I don't have pictures of on my last Instagram post, but it's kind of a mystery plant. For now All of the leaves are gone, but it's still got healthy green stems. It's still absorbing water from the pot. So when we find out what this mystery plant is, we will share. And then we got two adorable. They're like a lemon lime kind of spider plant looking, but it's not a spider plant. It is a pause for searching on greg app. They are dracana lemon lime. They are gorgeous.

Carla: 4:00

There was two plants in the one pot that linda gave us, so we separated them into two pots and then I kept one and Sammy took the other. And then an update on the fingers plant that I named Samantha, that I got previously. It's been also repotted and it's it's doing really well still. And then we had another different bacchia, this one larger, and then we had to use Another different bacchia, this one larger, and then we had to use zip ties to help secure it to its plant stake so that it would help stay up, because the soil didn't seem very well rooted. So it just needs a little extra support too. So thank you, linda. I love all these new plants that you gave us. They're going to be well loved and you can follow on updates on them as I post updates on Instagram and add progress pictures to each plant in the Greg app.

Carla: 4:54

Today I wanted to talk to you all about journaling with your garden and your indoor plant collection. I really enjoy my plant journal and my garden tracking, and there's a few reasons why I highly suggest that you, in your plant and gardening journeys keep a journal. The first one is to track progress by having records. It's like your own scientific adventure, observing the natural world and then documenting what you see, what you smell, what you can taste, if it's edible, what you feel if you can touch it. It's a great fun at least it's fun for me. Exciting thing to do is write about the things that you're passionate about. So if you're passionate about your plants and your garden, you can track its progress so that you'll see when you planted it, when's it going to be ready for harvest, things they have to do to help maintain the plant, when's it going to be ready for harvest, things they have to do to help maintain the plant. You can draw pictures of your plants as you're tracking their progress or if you have a image printer of your choice, like I have a little HP sprocket, so I'll take pictures of my plant's progress and print it out on two by three sticker sheets and just peel off the backing and stick them into my journal and add near each update.

Carla: 6:25

Another great reason to be keeping your plant journal is so that you have information about what you're growing Like. Did I get heirloom tomatoes or did I get beefsteak? Are these Roma or what? If they're just really small and maybe I got a cherry or a grape tomato plant. So it helps you keep track of what you have so that if you really enjoyed it, you have references to look back at previous years so you know what to expect for New Year's or if you had particular pests in your area, you can see about what time of year they were bothering your plants and then any steps that you took, whether or not they were successful in remediating the problem.

Carla: 7:10

I like to include any garden or plant related projects in my journal as well, so I will use this for material lists, estimations, diagrams, measurements, everything. So it's all in the one space and it's related to my plants, the garden. But then I'll take my whole journal with me to the hardware store so that I can get exactly what I wrote down for the project and if there's any questions or suggestions for better items to be using, then they also have the project plans to look at and give me the best help that I can get. Another great reason tracking your plants in a journal is you should have a map of the layout. That way, if the plant labels or lines in the garden get messed up because of a bad storm, you should still be able to figure out what was growing where so that you can tend to it properly. So there's two main ways of keeping a journal of any kind. You have digital versions and you have manual versions, like a literal, like moleskin and your favorite pens, or you have a fancy pre-printed fill out the blanks garden journal or, if you want, to use the bullet journal method. So there's a couple different ways that you can keep them.

Carla: 8:37

I'm going to start with digital just because it's the more railroaded path. As in, if you're not using a blank word document or a blank spreadsheet, a lot of the guides for helping you in planning your gardening and recording your progress is already done for you by the design of the system that you're using. So none of these are sponsored. But of course, I always love the Greg app. That's what I use personally to track the individual plants. Like I wouldn't use it on my outdoor garden, I'm using it for my indoor plant collection because it helps me remind me when the plants need to get a drink of water, tells me how much to water, it shows graphs on how long this watering should last. But again, these are just estimations, so like if you find that your aloe vera has dry soil, it needs to be watered three days early, you still update that you watered the plant on this day and it will adjust the calculations to account for this midweek watering. And the Greg app also has a wonderful reference library so you can use the image scanner to identify what kind of plant that you have. And I've used it a lot and it has taught me a lot about different lot and it has taught me a lot about different plants and it'll bring up references about that plant, so to say what temperatures it prefers, what kind of light indoor, outdoor, what kind of soil, how often it should be watered, based in your area, etc. So I really like the Greg app.

Carla: 10:16

Another one for gardening. This time I haven't used personally, but I've watched a lot of videos about it and I've seen it in advertisements a lot. It's called Seed Time, also not sponsored and there are more for garden planning so you'll see which crops you planted. It'll show a really cool Gantt chart over the year of like it should be planted here, these things along the journey, and then harvested or have harvest start at this time, and it also, I believe, tracks materials or maybe you can put projects in it as well, but it's really great for helping with, again, a reference to the different plants that you're planting in your garden, exactly what kind of requirements they need. So very similar to the Greg app, but instead of individual plants you're doing garden.

Carla: 11:09

Other digital forms include spreadsheets or text documents, so like if you're using the Google platform. This would be Google Sheets and then Google Docs, and you can arrange these however you like. You can adjust the grid size of cells in a spreadsheet to make an actual diagram of your garden or of your room and your house and then specifically lay out where everything is. Or the Word doc. You can very well format it as how we are doing with the pen and paper options. But the nice thing about the digital version of the document the text document is that you can put hyperlinks to different sections and you'll have a clear navigation menu so that you can easily skip back and forth, whereas with pen and paper you're flipping back and forth.

Carla: 11:59

I haven't personally done a spreadsheet one before, but I've seen lots of wonderful examples. I have tried google docs, but I find that if I have more than one journal, I have a really hard time maintaining one or the other. So, like I combine my personal journal also with my plant journal. Therefore, any notes I have I just reference year to year. Like I said, the text document can look like anything that we're going to be doing when I talk about the pen and paper options, so I'm not going to go too much more into the digital options. There is a ton of apps available, so just research which app you're using the Greg app I love, the seed time I'm looking into and those are the two main ones that I've been playing around with.

Carla: 12:45

For pen and paper. You can get graph paper and do similar to the spreadsheets and draw diagrams of your garden or room with plants. You can do a bullet journal method, so you have numbered pages and you follow as your version of what works best for you for the bullet journal method and you would um have a table of contents in the beginning of your journal and then have each page numbered and then you'll do'll do either daily spreads or weekly spreads, whatever works for you, and then include different types of spreads based on like plant information or projects etc. Or another fun way. If you have a lot of paper crafts that you do is you can do a scrapbook kind of journal where you take lots of pictures, you make pretty diagrams, you make it just as unique as you want to be. My personal favorite for a pen and paper is the bullet journal method, and then when I feel like a spread needs to be really pretty, I'll also scrapbook into it.

Carla: 13:55

The big takeaway from all these different options is to experiment. Try and try each one, or as many as you're willing to try, and see if they work for you, like if it makes you happy and you're using it. That's the big kicker. If you're not using it, it's not working. So find a way where you will be consistent in using it and that's the way it's. If you're not using it, it's not working. So find a way where you will be consistent in using it and that's the way it's going to best help you. If you're not using it, it's not helping you.

Carla: 14:25

The one that I've used the most is that burlet journaling with some scrapbooking, so that's the one I'm going to talk about here. All of these are applicable to the other versions but, like, when I talk about decorating it, I'm using um like a, a single book journal, so it's writing, drawing on a page rather than, however, but the idea of each of these spreads to include can be transferred to any of them, except for, like the Greg app and see time, some apps. They're designed a specific way so they have to be used a specific way. So some of the things that I like to include in my plant journal is definitely, first, information about the plant. So like, have a page dedicated to your tomatoes, have a page dedicated to your rosebush, have a page of information dedicated to your daffodils, your alocasia, your daffodil. So this is where you would have a picture of it. If you have a cutting, you can cut it out and glue it into your journal. If you have a sticker photo maker, print out a picture and stick it in there. Or if you have wonderful artistic skill, or even if you don't have wonderful artistic skill, if you just want to try it, draw a picture.

Carla: 15:44

Practice makes progress, so that'll help you with your gardening and with your art. So once I've got the information about the plants, then I can start including the any maps or layout diagrams so I can draw the plot of land in my backyard, where I'm going to have the garden and how I arranged it and I can color code sections and write the names. I could put page number references next to each image, saying, hey, I have information about this particular plant on page 20 in the journal. To go with a diagram of where your plants are planted, you can include a timeline chart or a Gantt chart of when they were planted so that you know, okay, I, I sowed it into the ground on this day, last frost is on this day. Or if you just want to make calendar pages in your journal and then write the important information on the calendar pages, this would be like monthly pages here, so that you're looking at a larger time scale. For looking at a smaller time scale, I usually don't go any smaller than a week because tasks are going to be weekly rather than daily when you're dealing with a garden, because while you can set time aside to weed every day, you're probably only going to weed like a couple days each week or you'll be like weeding on this day and then mulching on this day. So I will have monthly spreads to track long times, big picture items, and then I'll do weekly spreads that are my main page of the day, for, like these are my main tasks I want to complete this week. These are page references, page arrows to projects I'm working on or plant information or anything else I want to reference that's in another section of the journal.

Carla: 17:39

Another thing you might want to include in your journal are references of either a recipe or a how-to guide of something. So say, you just found out how to make nettle tea and so you want to make sure that you remember it. So you write down a quick draft in your plant journal because you have it out and about with you and then when you get home you could re-record it wherever you normally keep your recipes. Then when you get home you could re-record it wherever you normally keep your recipes. Or you're out foraging and you're going mushroom hunting and you've made a page about what you're going foraging for you can make a separate page that gives a little bit closer comparison and differences between two types of mushrooms that look really close, like morelsls, an amazing mushroom, but it looks very close to a poisonous mushroom, and so you have to make sure that certain characteristics are met. So you can put page arrows back and forth to their individual information pages. But you can also make a combined page where you have a at a glance view of characteristics and things to watch out for. For that you pick the, the new, the super yummy plant versus the one that'll be the last plant you ever eat. So that's a great list to get you started for main ideas to include in your journal.

Carla: 18:58

And I have a couple extra extras that are kind of fun. I've done them every once in a while. Extras that are kind of fun, I've done them every once in a while. You can include on your daily spread where it tracks your tasks each day of for the whole week, like kind of record the weather each day, the high, the low, maybe if you want to record sunrise, sunset, so you can compare past years, while we had we were in the 80s, at the 1, the first of June last year, but now we're like in the 60s, the first of June, like we had a cold spell or whatever. You can use your journal specifically as a note. So like you're sitting out reading your journal or working on something and you're like, oh, I gotta go shopping for this and you can just start a new page, make a shopping list whether or not it was garden related, but like it's, it's still a great place to record things like because it could be related.

Carla: 19:51

You can have motivational pages. So sometimes some days are harder than others, so you can make yourself a little positive motivation spread to help encourage you get up and do the thing, because you know you're going to feel better after you do the thing. You just got to go do the thing, so you need a little bit extra and that's okay. Or you can include art, inspiration, little doodles you've done anything and everything that you want to include. This is your journal you want to include. This is your journal. If you're really special and you absolutely adore your plant, you can also make a plant shrine collage in your journal. That might be fun. Other wonderful things to include in your journal but are not created by your own hand is you can take magazine clippings or paper clippings or internet printout clippings and add them to your journal as well. There are so many fun ways to tape in things to your journal. I highly recommend Pinterest Also not supported, also not sponsored, but I have a huge Pinterest board collection and so I've added a link specifically to my gardening board and all of its subcategories on my link tree, which you can find in the description below Things I like to include.

Carla: 21:16

Like every year I buy a new farmer's almanac for the year and I will either keep it close with my journal if I'm keeping everything in it or if I like specific things but not everything that's um in that year's print, um I'll cut them out and tape them directly in. Like if I find nothing good except for the calendar dates that show sunrise, sunset and the frost dates and etc. Like I'll take just those pages and stick them into the back of the journal. That way I have them as reference. Old magazines are great for any kind of picture. You want to cut out and paste into your journal Snippets from your favorite plant and garden magazines. Like every once in a while I'll buy a new garden magazine and if I just absolutely love a picture and there's nothing on the other side that I want to keep, I'll cut it out and put it in my journal. If I like the whole page spread because it's got some great recipes or some great tips, then I'll tear out the whole page and then find a way to kind of layer that in. So eventually, when you get pretty far along, or even maybe sometimes halfway along in the year about your journal, it starts to get thick and it's great.

Carla: 22:29

In this case, having more information and fun memories in your journal is better than having a skinny little book and it gives it character. You can decorate the cover Like I love to cover mine in stickers that I get all over the place. So that's how I keep all my sticker collection is I just put them on my journals every year. Now, all of these are ideas are also applicable to if you wanted to use a three ring binder set up in my Pinterest. I have been reading through and I found a lot of three ring binder ready to print. They they're free Hear my air quotes.

Carla: 23:05

You'd have to put in your email address. So this podcast email is growingwithcarla at gmailcom. So instead of putting that in to receive the free document, put growing at Carla, the plus sign and then the name of the website that you're using, like a short name or something that you'll recognize. So like we'll go growing with Carla plus Greg at gmailcom With that extra little plus, it still goes to your mailbox, but now if you put a mail forwarding rule, looking for growingwithcarlaplusgreg at gmailcom, it will automatically grab all those emails and then move them to a specific folder. So it really helps with cleaning up a lot of the junk mail, or if a site somehow sells your information, you can know which site sold your information Doing that. Though if it creates an account for you, I would definitely make sure to use a password manager so that you don't have to remember all that stuff and just have it autofill. I highly recommend 1Password not sponsored.

Carla: 24:22

Anyways, that's my technology spiel, but there is on my Pinterest board a lot of three ring binder printouts that you can use, so if you want to take a look, definitely go through those. If you have any questions, please send me a message and I will gladly talk about any of your plant journal ideas with you, because that's actually really awesome. I love it. But what you can do in a three ring binder, which is a lot harder than any of the other methods, is that you can get baseball card pages. You can stick your seed packets directly into those baseball card slots. That way, your seeds are also in your journal that you take around, so, like if you run out of seeds one year, you still have the packet from last year, so you know what kind of seeds you need new if you're not able to harvest those seeds yourself.

Carla: 25:14

There are a ton of ideas out there for how to do your garden journal, your plant journal, your journal in general. Experiment, absolutely search online or go through my pinterest boards for ideas about what you can do to do, about what you can do with your journal, what kind of things you can track in there. But the biggest thing is experiment, find what works for you and make it your own. So this goes into my tips about maintaining your journal. The biggest thing is make it your own. If these ideas don't help, you don't use them. If you find something that's really yucky and you can't keep up week to week, don't use it. Make something else.

Carla: 25:57

This is your journal. You can do anything you want to with it. There are literally no mistakes. So, like I will purposely take the last page of each journal and use it as my pen testing scribble page, because then the journal is not perfect anymore. You've already broken that sanctity of new book feeling and you can it's okay to make messes, smudge your ink, make streaks, take weird colors, hate those colors and then go over those color with the color that you like. There are no mistakes when it comes to your journal and it's only for you the things that you put in this journal. They don't go beyond you unless you share it. So and you don't have to share it if you don't want to. So if it's not helping you, don't use it. If you're not using your journal, it's not helping you, so make it help you, make it yours.

Carla: 26:52

And that goes into my next tip of make it convenient. Either have your journal in a space that you are okay with sitting down, or if you have a standing desk or whatever where you write, or you keep it next to your bedside and you write first thing in the morning or last thing at night before you go to bed. Make it convenient to use your journal, because I don't know about you, but all me with my neurodivergent mind if I don't make it convenient, it's a lot harder for me to make sure that I'm doing it and then again make it your own. If I don't make it convenient, it's a lot harder for me to make sure that I'm doing it and then again, make it your own. If you don't like something, don't use it. You don't have to stick with anything in this journal that you don't like. You can literally scribble the whole page out, or sometimes it's a really big thing that I don't want to see. I'll just glue two pages together. So if you don't like it, don't keep it. Change it up, make it something that you're going to like and there are no mistakes. So it's fun sometimes to look at the pages where you're like I don't like this. Just use that page as a future scribble page or pen test page. Remember that this is a tool to help you, not hinder you. If it's if you're not using it, it's not helping you. I'm just going to repeat that again because it's so important. If you're not using it, it's not helping you. So find a way to make it useful for you and find a way to make sure that you're using it consistently.

Carla: 28:16

If you are doing the bullet journal method, there are a ton of journal options out there. A lot of them do not have numbered pages. So if you do want that handy reference back and forth between pages, definitely take the time if it's a journal that you really want to use to go ahead and number the pages. So that would all do in a little blurb or even at the bottom of the page if this whole page continues on to a new page. So, like, say, I'm on page 23 with my project idea, but I've already used the next couple of pages for my next few weekly spreads since I started that project idea. Then I'll go right at the page number, a number with an arrow pointing to the right, because for English language writing we write left to right, so right would mean going forward to page 30 or if it's going back a page, it'll be like a left arrow and a number and then on the new page also, you can reference back to the page that it came from again.

Carla: 29:22

If you have any questions or if you just want to talk about ideas, I would love to hear more from you and hear your questions and so that we can get the best ideas for you into your journal. If you've already started your journal, I would love to see any pages you're willing to share. Mention at me on Instagram and tag it with plant journal or garden journal and then tag at growing with Carla. I would love to see how you organize yourself and we can share it with the community. I do have a lot of my own ideas on my Pinterest boards, so please use it there If there are also.

Carla: 30:06

I have a. I also have some regular journaling boards too. If you also want to take a look at that the link, you'll just have to go up to my profile and then down to the other board. All right, friends, I really appreciate you for taking time out of your busy day to be with me. It means a lot. If you enjoyed this episode or found any part of it useful, please share it with those that you love, those that you like, or even those that you just tolerate that also really like plants. It would help me out greatly. Please also check out my Instagram and send me pictures of your plant babies. Tag me at GrowingWithCarla. I would love to see them. Remember, be safe and make wise choices. We'll talk again next time.